Censored Realities / Changing New York
- Submitting institution
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Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1384
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Book as artefact with an audio-visual exhibition version
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- December
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/24848/
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Censored Realities/Changing New York, a photo-text book (Camera Austria, 2018) with an audio-visual exhibition version (John Hansard Gallery, 2019), generates significant new readings of a body of photographic work, Changing New York by Berenice Abbott (1939), considered seminal within the history of documentary photographic practice. It captures the originally intended captions to Abbott’s photographs, which are published for the first time in full. These socially and politically engaged texts were written by Abbott’s long-term partner, art critic and writer Elizabeth McCausland. McCausland’s texts were rejected by the editor, replaced by image captions that Dutton credit to McCausland, reduced to the most conventional and minimal information inserts, captioning Abbott’s photographs much like a conventional guidebook to the city of New York. The authors had intended a critically and socially engaged book, utilizing a highly innovative photo-text book design.
Censored Realities/Changing New York is structured around an index system which allows a reader to re-unite each original text caption with the corresponding Abbott photograph. Abbott’s photographs are still in circulation through a Dover edition of Changing New York and accessible through numerous museum websites. The concept of the book positions the reader actively within a process of unearthing original intentions. This process echoes Maude-Roxby’s and Seibold’s long-term Resist: be modern (again) research that is committed to unveiling and putting back into circulation collaborative works by women since the 1920s. The book includes facsimile letters relating to the 1930s editing process from McCausland, Abbott, Paul Strand, an insert from artist Zoe Leonard, and contextual essays. The contextual sections within the book articulate the processes via which the intended Changing New York publication was censored, and how the art historical canon continued a process of erasure, making absent an entire network of women like McCausland and Abbott.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -